Health New Zealand has confirmed two separate technical failures affected hospital systems across parts of the South Island on Wednesday, forcing staff in some areas to revert to manual processes.

Kirsty Martin, Regional Group Manager – Te Waipounamu, Integration & Delivery, Data & Digital, said one issue involved a regional portal used across the South Island, while the other impacted an application in Dunedin and Southland.

“As a large organisation with a significant number of different applications running in different parts of the country, we experience technical issues from time to time,” Martin said.

“We have well-established contingencies in place to manage these issues when they arise, to ensure patients continue to get the care they need.”

She said the more significant issue, involving the South Island-wide portal, was resolved on the same day and work was ongoing to fix the second issue.

“While these technical issues caused some inconvenience for our people, there were no impacts for patient care.”

A patient who contacted Chris Lynch Media said hospital staff were unable to access patient records and were forced to do everything “the old way” while systems were down.

They said they were surprised it hadn’t been publicly reported sooner, given the disruption.